At least she never walked

Part I: At least she never walked…

My initial objectives for signing up for the half marathon were simple:

1. Prove to myself: mind over matter. At least I had some control over my physical being
2. Engage with the New York City community in a new way
3. Document my experience in a style similar to Murakami’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. Then share it with those closest to me.

This is a manifestation of objective #3 and reflections on objectives 1 and 2. What is fascinating are the nuances and tangential discoveries that manifested themselves along the way. Before we embark, I hope that my reader is comfortable because my goal, unlike Murakami, is to make you feel my as uncomfortable as possible from here on out.
It is a warm spring day in New York City. You may be taking a stroll along Central Park West, relieved that the days of being cooped up in your apartment with stale Chinese takeout dinners are behind you. You see several hundred women running 13.1 miles together. Onlookers cheer on the sidelines. Curious, you take a moment to peer over the walls of the park to watch and notice at the mile 7 or 8 mark one anonymous runner. She must think, no one is watching. She appears to be thinking hard about something. What could she possibly be thinking about? Is she thinking at all? This is a story about that.

As with most things in life, what appears easy enough is neither easy nor enough. Not easy because there are no shortcuts; your average mile time is as stoic and immutable as a score on an exam. Not enough because one completed 5K turns into a desire for 10K, then a half, eventually a marathon, a 50 mile mission in a foreign land, and so on. If you are reading this, you likely know me because you too unwittingly have over-achiever syndrome and I probably don’t have to explicitly spell out to you how that has real life applications beyond long-distance running. Case in point: my desire to run a full marathon is now at an all-time high. Let me share that high with you.

I knew after reading Murakami’s philosophy as it unfolded through long-distance running that this was an exercise that was equal parts physical as mental. I was fascinated in what I could discover about the community and myself through the endeavor. I knew that I could apply myself as I always do: plan, observe, learn, pivot, try again, advance, repeat, execute. And that’s what happens 99.99% of the time – the execution of the task at hand… but what’s 100x more fascinating is how you get there. You know the cliché: it’s about the journey, not the destination; you can go the distance; Homer’s Iliad; Virgil’s Aeneid; etc. I once attempted to write an essay on the analysis of glory in Homer’s Iliad. It was the first essay I ever wrote at Columbia and I had to re-write it three times before my professor deemed it acceptable. B+ with a “good analysis but not quite”. How frustrating is that? Not quite. What does that even mean? We all know that the Greek hero is defined by honor and glory but what is honor and glory? No matter how much you analyze the imagery, metaphor, language, I still don’t think the answer is obvious within that text. I must have spent hours in Lerner trying to crack thousands of literary and philosophical codes and you know what I figured out in school? Zilch. Nada. Here’s the fun part though. The learning never stops. It was the introduction of the problem. The solution continues to unfold day by day. And for that reason, I am forever grateful I sat in that cold student lounge for hours on end. And to address the not quite comment, here’s my revised proposition that I hope is not downgraded by the Core’s standards. Honor is the relinquishment of individual human needs. Honor is looking beyond what you or I need on a personalized level and prioritizing what society needs. Home and safety have relatively less value that the pursuit of glory. Your family will thereby be proud of you. And you ultimately can achieve glory and transcend the physical, immediate world with something everlasting. Even after you have perished in death, you’ve got a body worthwhile fishing out from the battlefield and preserving in a majestic tomb. A tomb that hopefully reads better than “at least she never walked”.

In the preface of his book, Murakami introduces the mantra, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” I know that piece of wisdom was imparted in the context of running but this too also applies outside of long-distance running. No matter how much fortune is on your side, pain, loss, disappointment are going to happen. It’s just a matter of when and at what velocity. If you have gotten this far in life without experiencing that, I hope your innocence is preserved for as long as you need but hate to break it to you kiddo, at some point you will inevitably get hit with that gut-wrenching bile. Maybe you learn your parents aren’t the perfect heroes you hoped for, maybe someone doesn’t love you in the same way you love them, maybe you get chronically ill, maybe you’ll lose someone. I’m here to encourage you to let go of that fear and find joy in the pain. In fact, I would propose that pain is equally as beautiful as pleasure and probably a more elegant art. Let’s try it.